[M]uch of the admiration is rooted in the truth-teller’s focus on the looming fiscal iceberg and willingness to tell audiences what they don’t want to hear. Better yet, the candidate pushes aside the divisive social issues that are thought to be non-negotiable with the party bases.

Daniels voiced such an idea fairly explicitly in a much-buzzed-about Weekly Standard profile last summer, calling for a “truce” in the culture wars so the political class can get down to the business of repairing the country’s finances.

In other words, cultural warfare is a waste of time – we need to focus on class warfare instead.

Randy Sharp, director-special projects at the AFA, said that in the past five years the group has seen the percentage of retailers recognizing Christmas in their advertising rise from 20 percent to 80 percent. Just eight retailers are left on the group’s list of “Companies Against Christmas.”

It’s also become more challenging to find a large, national retailer to single out for the group’s annual boycott. This year, Dick’s Sporting Goods, which boasts an online “Holiday Shop,” will be the target of the boycott. The AFA is expected to send an Action Alert to its 2.3 million supporters on Friday morning. That alert will urge shoppers to boycott Dick’s between now and Dec. 25. It also calls for consumers to e-mail President-Chief Operating Officer Joseph Schmidt and then call Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Hennion. The retailer declined to comment. In the past, Target, Sears, Gap and Walmart have been targets.

Indeed, retailers that have found themselves the target of boycotts or media and consumer scrutiny have responded swiftly in recent years. Lowe’s “Family Trees” were renamed “Christmas Trees,” while Walmart’s “Holiday Shop” is now a “Christmas Shop.” Midway through the 2005 holiday season, Target, facing a boycott, announced its advertising messages would become more specific and include references to Christmas. And last year, Gap responded to a boycott by issuing a press release highlighting the use of the phrase “Merry Christmas” in its upcoming Old Navy ads.

Thank goodness, the retailers have finally been freed from the bullying and oppression of the PC police! Now they can enjoy the same feeling of freedom that the Iraqis felt seven years ago!

O’Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons’ position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine.

Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that “religious doctrine doesn’t belong in our public schools.”

“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” O’Donnell asked him.

When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O’Donnell asked: “You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?”

Wow. She’s running for United States Senate and she has absolutely no idea what the First Amendment says. And Republican voters thought she would make a better United States Senator than Mike Castle.

My favorite part:

“You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp,” Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate….

Of course, if it had been a Tea Party rally, she probably would have gotten a standing ovation… from the same people who say they want to protect the Constitution from Obama and them damn librul Democrats.

The Orlando Sentinel has a story about David Barton, a Glenn Beck/Tea Party favorite who is an America Fuck Yeah! evangelical who distorts history to claim that the Founders intended the US to be a Christian nation and that the First Amendment was only intended to protect religion from government intervention and not vice versa. But this is my favorite part:

Wednesday, Barton’s penchant for absolutes was on display. He told his audience that of the 192 members of the United Nation’s, America stood alone as a beacon of stability.

“We’re a very blessed nation,” he said. “We happen to be the only nation that does not average a revolution every 30 to 40 years. Of 192 nations, we’re the only one with that type of stability.”

Asked later about the accuracy of that – after all, Canada and England had pretty stable 20th Centuries – Barton said he was speaking “figuratively.”

It sure is a shame that so many of his teabagger fans are so eager to spoil our awesome revolution-free streak. I’m sure it makes him very sad, and he probably urges them to give such talk a rest all the time.

MALVEAUX: Hundreds of people in Cologne, Germany, have been watching this story unfold with special interest, because they are members of Jones’ former church.

(…)

HEINZ KOOP, FORMER JONES FOLLOWER: He was a charismatic leader. I think he was — the preference was very strong for us.

BLACK: Jones’ church, the Christian Community of Cologne, became the focus of their lives. Jones insisted on it, borrowing an infamous Nazi motto. . . .

H. KOOP: And we worked the whole week, also Sunday and Saturday.

BLACK (on camera): For the church?

ELKA KOOP, FORMER JONES FOLLOWER: Yes.

H. KOOP: For the church, yes.

E. KOOP: Work made free.

BLACK: Is that what he said?

E. KOOP: Yes.

BLACK: Work makes you free?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

That’s right, Terry Jones adopted the motto of the Dachau concentration camp. In Germany. But that’s not all:

Outside contact, even with family for weddings and funerals, is prohibited for students who attend the Dove World Outreach Academy in Gainesville. The academy members live on property owned by TS and Company, work in the selling, packing and shipping of furniture and are unpaid.

So not only does Jones think the Dachau motto was just swell, but he has actually convinced parents to pay him to put their kids in an honest-to-God work camp. This guy truly makes my skin crawl.

Stanley Fish had a nice column in yesterday’s NYT pointing out the cynical inconsistency of right-wing reaction to terrorist attacks, depending on the perpetrator:

In the brief period between the bombing and the emergence of McVeigh, speculation had centered on Arab terrorists and the culture of violence that was said to be woven into the fabric of the religion of Islam.

But when it turned out that a white guy (with the help of a few of his friends) had done it, talk of “culture” suddenly ceased and was replaced by the vocabulary and mantras of individualism: each of us is a single, free agent; blaming something called “culture” was just a way of off-loading responsibility for the deeds we commit; in America, individuals, not groups, act; and individuals, not groups, should be held accountable. McVeigh may have looked like a whole lot of other guys who dressed up in camouflage and carried guns and marched in the woods, but, we were told by the same people who had been mouthing off about Islam earlier, he was just a lone nut, a kook, and generalizations about some “militia” culture alive and flourishing in the heartland were entirely unwarranted.

(…)

It is wrong, we hear, to regard the proposed mosque or community center as an ordinary exercise of free enterprise and freedom of religion by the private owners of a piece of property. It is, rather, a thumb in the eye or a slap in the face of the 9/11 victims and their families, a potential clearinghouse for international terrorist activities, a “victory mosque” memorializing a great triumph of jihad and a monument to the religion in whose name and by whose adherents the dreadful deed was done.

But according to the same folks who oppose the mosque because of what it stands for, Michael Enright’s act doesn’t stand for anything and is certainly not the product of what Time magazine calls a growing “American strain of Islamophobia.” Instead, The New York Post declares, the stabbing is “the act of a disturbed individual who is now in custody,” and across the fold of the page columnist Jonah Goldberg says that “one assault doesn’t a national trend make” and insists that “we shouldn’t let anyone suggest that this criminal reflects anybody but himself.”

The formula is simple and foolproof (although those who deploy it so facilely seem to think we are all fools): If the bad act is committed by a member of a group you wish to demonize, attribute it to a community or a religion and not to the individual. But if the bad act is committed by someone whose profile, interests and agendas are uncomfortably close to your own, detach the malefactor from everything that is going on or is in the air (he came from nowhere) and characterize him as a one-off, non-generalizable, sui generis phenomenon.

How many violent homicidal right-wing crazies do we have to see before we see some conservatives start to admit that maybe, just maybe, that DHS report was right about the dangers of right-wing extremism, not to mention all the provocative teabagger rhetoric about 2nd Amendment remedies and watering the tree of liberty? Or are murder and incitement okay as long as you pretend that they’re motivated by patriotism?

One thing I like to say is: America is great, not because of our genetics. We’re great because we created a place and space where people can be free. And they can choose Christ, they can choose to be faithful. They can worship, and they find their way to the Lord. And — or some of them don’t. We sure want them all to, but some of them don’t.

And part of that freedom — when you take a government and you impose, and take away all your choices. One of the choices you take away is to find the Lord. And find your savior.

And that’s one of the things that’s most destructive about the growth of government. It’s this taking away that freedom. The freedom — the ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation. And to find Christ, for me and you.

And I think that’s one of the things that we have to be very, very aware of that the Obama Administration and Congressman Carnahan are doing to us.

Police conducted the June 24 raids during the monthly meeting of the Belgian Bishops Conference, detaining the nine members for hours and confiscating their cell phones.

They searched two main church offices and the home of former Archbishop Godfried Danneels, seizing computers and files, and opened a tomb, prompting outrage from the Vatican.

“The Secretariat of State expresses its deep shock over the way some of the searches were carried out…and its indignation over the violation” of the tomb, the Vatican said in a statement Friday.

Speaking out for the first time since the raids, the pope issued a letter to the head of the Belgian Bishops Conference Sunday. “At this sad time, I wish to express … my closeness and solidarity for the surprising and deplorable ways in which the searches were carried out,” he wrote.

“I hope that justice takes its course, guaranteeing the fundamental rights of people and institutions with respect to the victims, recognizing without prejudice all those who are committed to collaborating with justice and refuting all that which seeks to obscure its noble goals.”

I’ve always been mystified by this country’s willingness to just let the Catholic Church handle sex abuse cases in-house, as if our own criminal and legal system has no jurisdiction over them. But obviously the Church believes that to be the natural order of things.

As Talking Points Memo’s Justin Elliott described in a June 15, 2010 story, Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle was a member of the Independent American Party of Nevada during the 1990’s, from 1992 to 1997, during which time the IAPN engaged in bizarre anti-gay agitation and campaigns to legalize discrimination against homosexuality. Describes Elliott,

The small party attracted considerable controversy in 1994 when it took out a newspaper ad titled “Consequences of Sodomy: Ruin of a Nation,” which suggested HIV could spread through the water.

It wasn’t a fluke. As Elliott’s TPM story goes on to detail,

During the period that Angle was a member, the party bought a red, white, and blue 16-page advertising insert in several Nevada newspapers to promote an effort to add a clause to the state constitution stating that “objection to homosexuality is a liberty and right of conscience and shall not be considered discrimination relating to civil rights,” according to a 1994 article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The so-called Minority Status and Child Protection Act would have explicitly allowed discrimination against gay people in jobs and housing.The party then picketed a newspaper, the Reno Gazette-Journal, that refused to run the ad.

Angle apologists will no doubt try to claim that Sharron Angle’s stance towards homosexuality and gay rights has changed since the 1990’s, but that’s not going to be so easy given that, according to Angle’s current official biography, “She is proud of her past chairwomanship of We the People Nevada PAC that sponsored the Property Tax Restraint Initiative.”

The We The People PAC had a web presence from 2003 to 2007, during which time its statement of principles web site page declared, “The radical homosexual movement and other groups seek to destroy the traditional family structure which is the underpinning of society. Their agenda should be opposed.”

I’m always kind of mystified by any claims about the existence of a vast gay conspiracy in a country where only a few gay people can get married, where they can be legally discriminated against, and where they’re not allowed to serve openly in the military or even donate blood.

Bad enough that Chris Hedges paints a terrifying picture of just how insane and evil and dangerous the Christian right is, but he also points out how the fecklessness and corruption of the Democratic establishment has enabled it by doing so little to push back against the out-of-control corporations that have destroyed our environment and economy.

I think he probably overstates just how numerous and powerful the truly crazy right-wing Christians are, but they clearly do have enough influence on American policy and discourse to be very, very scary.

It has always really, really bugged me how Republicans claim the mantle of being the Christian party, even though their policies and demeanor are pretty much the exact opposite of everything Jesus stood for, but not having much of a religious background I can’t really be much more specific than referring to me general impression that Jesus stood for things like peace, love, charity and compassion.

Well, Mike Lux can, and the result is pretty awesome. You should check it out.

Last week, retired Bishop Giacomo Babini of the Italian town of Grosseto told the Catholic Pontifex website that the Catholic pedophile scandal is being orchestrated by the “eternal enemies of Catholicism, namely the freemasons and the Jews, whose mutual entanglements are not always easy to see through… I think that it is primarily a Zionist attack, in view of its power and refinement. They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God-killers.”

You might think that the 81-year-old Babini had already said more than enough for one day, but once some people “pop,” they just can’t stop. “The Holocaust was a shame for all of humanity,” the good bishop told the world, “but now we have to look at it without rhetoric and with open eyes. Don’t believe that Hitler was merely crazy. The truth is that the Nazis’ criminal fury was provoked by the Jews’ economic embezzlement, by which they choked the German economy.” He concluded that the Jews’ “guilt is graver than what Christ predicted would happen to them, saying ‘do not cry for me, but for your own children.'”

(…)

This latest scapegoating attempt came out not only in the days around Holocaust Remembrance Day but also on the heels of the latest alarmist report by Tel Aviv University announcing a drastic increase in anti-Semitic activity around the globe, and with historian Robert Wistrich saying that “We are in an era once again where the Jews are facing genocidal threats as a people.”

Ah yes, of course. Obviously the Jews used the same mind-control rays that we used to take over Hollywood and the world banking system to force those poor Catholic priests to molest children against their will, and then force their bishops and cardinals to cover it up! It’s all so obvious now!

For a religion that emphasizes confession, the Catholic Church sure is doing an awful lot of finger-pointing.

“The pope defends life and the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, in a world in which powerful lobbies would like to impose a completely different” agenda, Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, head of the disciplinary commission for Holy See officials, said on the radio.

(…)

Also arguing that Benedict’s promotion of conservative family models had provoked the so-called attacks was the Vatican’s dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano.

“By now, it’s a cultural contrast,” Sodano told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. “The pope embodies moral truths that aren’t accepted, and so, the shortcomings and errors of priests are used as weapons against the church.”

Yes, yet another wanker has compared reaping the consequences of wrongdoing to the Holocaust. This time it’s a senior Vatican priest comparing the “violent” persecution of the Catholic Church to the persecution of the Jews.

I guess that’s because the Jews protected pedophiles in their midst for decades, right?

And that’s what pisses me off so much about these wankers comparing their comeuppance to the Holocaust. Not only does it trivialize one of history’s most terrible tragedies, but it implies that the Jews brought it on themselves.

Please, if you’re going to compare your suffering to that of the Jews, at least have the decency for it to be equally undeserved.

If the Catholic Church were as tolerant and protective toward gays as they are toward pedophiles, same-sex marriage would be legal in every state by now.

And if it were as committed to peace and compassion as it is to outlawing abortions, we probably wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, and the healthcare reform bill would have contained a public option at the very least.

Perhaps I’m just imagining it, but the enemies of womens’ choice seem to be a lot more universally opposed to the Nelson “compromise” in the Senate bill than liberal healthcare advocates are to its lack of a public option. Despite the fact that Nelson is a lot closer to Stupak than No Public Option is to Public Option, and the fact that reconciliation could be used to pass the public option, but not to pass Stupak.

At any rate, I certainly don’t see a whole lot of bishops or Blue Dogs saying, “Come on! This is a historic once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to roll back women’s rights! Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good!”

I really really hated having to choose between choice and the public option, but choosing between choice and forcing people to buy crappy private insurance policies they probably can’t afford to use isn’t very difficult at all. But one that, amazingly, Obama and the Democrats are still on the brink of getting wrong.

It’s a double epic fail. Like saying that everyone has to give up their bathroom privileges in exchange for mandatory shit sandwich lunches every day (“But look! Now everyone gets a lunch! Isn’t that awesome?”).